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LEADING A GREAT NATION, AS BARACK OBAMA confessed in his review of his first hundred days as president, is no piece of cake. Whether it's the Taliban running wild in Pakistan or the Republicans running wild in Congress, the Iraqis shooting each other up in Baghdad or Joe Biden shooting off his mouth in D.C., erstwhile world-class banks begging for handouts, the swine-flu epidemic, the dented remnants of our auto industry desperately embracing bankruptcy or flirting with it -- it's one darn stressful thing after another.

And we haven't even mentioned trying to settle into still-unfamiliar digs with both a new dog and a mother-in-law.

The ceaseless pressures, of course, come with the territory, and not only for Mr. Obama. Recession and its attendant miseries are rife around the globe and putting great strain on leaders virtually everywhere. Our new president ought to thank his lucky stars he has a smart and spirited spouse to help meet the monumental challenges confronting him.

The importance of such a helpmate is too often neglected in the calculations of political pundits, regardless of whether they lean left or right or simply wobble in the center, as they assess the performance of various leaders. But the leaders themselves, to judge by their actions, are highly conscious of it.

Which explains, for instance, what easily could be misconstrued as the erratic, even naughty, behavior of Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy -- behavior, we might add, that prompted his wife to write a scathing letter complaining about it to an Italian news service. More specifically, she objected, and not for the first time in a public forum, of his consorting, as the New York Times put it, "with young and chesty women."

Far from acting on any salacious impulses, we're sure it is merely Mr. Berlusconi's way of catching his wife's attention (she, incidentally, is 20 years younger than he and extremely attractive), to remind her how much he needs her to share the burdens of office. We can only infer that the Italian citizenry was quick to grasp his true motives, since the airing of his wife's suspicions hasn't diminished his popularity one bit (eat your heart out, Bill Clinton).

In like vein (or is it vain?), Jacob Zuma, about to become president of South Africa, has gone to great lengths to be prepared for the rigors of his new post by having two wives (the second married only last year) and, according to The Wall Street Journal, is eyeing a third, in keeping with his insightful recognition that you can never have too much help in coping with the multitude of economic, political and social problems that confront a country's leader these days.

As the Journal piece notes, there is still the thorny question as to which of the trio will be South Africa's First Lady, Second Lady or Third Lady. Maybe they'll take turns.

Except for those who are keen on foreign affairs, the denizens of Wall Street are apt to give scant notice to heads of state and their trials and tribulations, much less their spousal arrangements. And who can blame them? After all, no one ever got rich worrying whether a president or a premier of some alien country was faithful or a philanderer.

For that matter, the only marriages Wall Street has ever paid much heed to are the nuptials -- bereft of even a hint of romance -- known as mergers. And there has been a notable paucity of those of late as tough times in the economy, the credit markets and the stock market sharply curbed the corporate urge to merge.

Comes now the shotgun wedding -- proposed but not as yet consummated -- between bankrupt Chrysler and the Italian auto maker Fiat, with a grim Uncle Sam as matchmaker and dowry donor. It's hardly the kind of arranged joining together that sends shouts of "Whoopee!" jubilantly echoing through the Street.

The holdouts huff that their rejection of the government's offer is based on principle. Perhaps they mean principal, since reportedly they were willing to accept 36 cents on the dollar. Chrysler debt had been trading for less than half that much, so maybe the better part of wisdom would have been to take the money and run.

Crucial to the deal is Chrysler escaping quickly from the clammy grip of bankruptcy, and quickly, in this instance, means several months, not the years it took airlines in a similar bind to emerge.

Once it does, the company will be 55% owned by the United Auto Workers' retirement fund and something between 20% and 35% by Fiat, with Washington a heavy presence on the liberated company's board. Fiat is bringing its know-how on making small, gas-efficient cars -- but no dough -- to the party.

That expertise, and even more so, its line of agricultural and construction equipment, have stood the company in very good stead in recent years. But in the first quarter of '09, they proved no match for the one-two punch of recession and the big skid of the global auto market. Fiat wound up in the red, its car sales off 18% from the like year-earlier quarter.

Even if the stay in bankruptcy is brief and the merger goes smoothly -- and those are big ifs -- the great unknown is whether Americans will go for a small non-gas-guzzler. And on that score, history and a continuing infatuation with jalopies that boast size and muscle stack the odds against it.

In short, the road ahead for this latest incarnation of Chrysler looks bumpy, especially if, as we suspect, the economy is likely to take its own sweet time getting back in the groove. But, for all that, we still wish it a bon voyage.

THE INCOMPARABLE STEPHANIE POMBOY, no stranger to this space, week in week out spices her intriguing insights with sprightly irreverence. But she was really in top form in the latest edition of her worthy MacroMavens commentary. So we thought we might pass along some of her bon thoughts and bon mots that enlightened and tickled us.

Under the elegant title "Burping Out Loud," Stephanie stands the conventional wisdom on its head on corporate profits and the stock market. We should warn you that recovery isn't currently a prominent part of her lexicon.

For openers, she doesn't buy the growing conviction that what we've been witnessing is more than a bear-market rally.

And her Exhibit A is the amount of financial pain being priced into the credit markets. She readily grants that spreads have narrowed, but notes that they remain "far, far wider than they were at the 2003 cycle lows."

The complacent reaction among the investment cognoscenti is that the credit markets are wildly oversold. More likely, she sniffs, it has something to do with the fact that "an overwhelming portion of some $8 trillion in mortgage debt (or 80% of the total) is teetering on the edge of, or in some state of, negative equity."

As to the Fed's claim that the equity of homeowners as a group stands at 43%, she points out that what the Fed neglects to tell you is that roughly a third of them have their houses free and clear. Lo and behold, some basic arithmetic reveals that 67% of homeowners with mortgages have equity of less than 15%. That, Stephanie comments drily, suggests the "destruction priced into the credit markets hardly seems out of whack with potential reality."

And while, thanks to "the transfer of toxic assets to taxpayers" and the magic of accounting legerdemain, the scarred financials to some significant extent may be spared further pain, the same, alas, can't be said for the nonfinancial sector. Little recognized, she insists, is how much the extraordinary gains in domestic nonfinancial profits from the low in 2001 to the peak in 2006 -- a stunning rise of 388% -- owed to the housing bubble.

"Who in his right mind," she asks, "would believe that explosion in profits during the housing-bubble stretch a mere coincidence and, therefore, in no way subject to the same inexorable decline?" Since we delight in answering rhetorical questions, we'd reckon not more than 95% of the folks who contend we're in a new bull market.

Absent the powerful stimulus provided by the unprecedented boom in housing, she sees a huge hit still in the offing for nonfinancial corporate profits. A worst-case analysis is that such profits would sink to 2003 levels, a further decline of $450 billion, or 54%. Under a less exacting (and frightening) estimate, using their relationship to GDP, they would return to their pre-bubble percentage of 3.5%, which translates into a drop from here of $340 billion, or 41%.

At the end of the day, earnings, to state the obvious, are what makes the stock market go up -- and down. The prospect that they are in for a fresh drubbing is all the more ominous because it's unexpected. As Stephanie reflects, "bear-market rallies come and go, but what makes this one so noteworthy is just how far removed perception is from reality."